[ecrea] Conference: The Still image in Conflict since 1945 - Manchester Met Uni

Thu Mar 22 13:25:35 GMT 2018

http://www.art.mmu.ac.uk/events/2018/the-pictures-of-war/
Wednesday 23 — Friday 25 May 2018
Pictures of War: The Still Image in Conflict since 1945
24 – 25 May 2018
Main Conference at Manchester Metropolitan University
Keynote Speaker: Artist Oliver Chanarin, Broomberg & Chanarin
23 May 2018, 5.30pm
Public Lecture by Louie Palu
Documentary photographer and filmmaker
23 May 2018
Masterclass on Pictures and Conflicts
For Postgraduate Research Students and Early Career Researchers

A conference on the intersections of conflict and pictures from the end
of the Second World War to the present day.

Since the end of the Second World War, the nature and depiction of
geopolitical conflicts have changed in technology, scale and character.
The Cold War political landscape saw many anti-colonial struggles for
liberation and national identity become proxy battlegrounds for the
major powers. Wars continue to be waged in the name of democracy and
terror, and in the interests of linguistic, theological and racial
worldviews and migration and displacement are again at the top of the
agenda.

As the technologies of war have shifted, so have the technologies of
making pictures. This conference seeks to engage with these phenomena
through critically engaged approaches to the processes of visualisation,
their methodologies and epistemologies to contribute to our
understanding of the ways conflicts are pictured. The intention is to
expand the field of enquiry beyond localised, thematic or media-specific
approaches and to encourage new perspectives on the material and visual
cultures of pictures.

In looking at and in producing pictures, academics and practitioners are
often aware of what Fritz Saxl called A Heritage of Images (1957) in
self-conscious or subliminal ways. Pictorial accounts of contemporary
conflicts arguably depend for their affectivity and recognisability upon
their resonance with already existing historical depictive traditions.
Contributions to this strand would seek to interrogate the idea that
visibility (Ranciere, 2004; Butler, 2009) is manifested in pictorial
images, and to investigate how far what pictures depict and represent is
dependent on the ability to recover the past in the present: ‘namely,
that images with a meaning peculiar to their own time place, once
created, have a magnetic power to attract other ideas into their sphere;
that they can suddenly be forgotten and remembered again after centuries
of oblivion.’ (Saxl, 1947).

Pictures on the Move, Visualising Solidarities

The various expressions of solidarity have created pictures that
reflected and inspired affinities and networks of possibilities beyond
their intended aims and specific trajectories. Visual and material
manifestations across ideological, ethnic and national borders, range
from international solidarity in the struggles against totalitarianism
in its various forms, colonialism, militarism and racism, as well as in
demand for equal rights for women, LGBTQ individuals, refugees, and
migrants. What kind of discourses do manifestations of solidarity
trigger, and what kind of pictures do they produce? How do they vary
across time and from one place to another? What are the different ways
that they have shaped individual and collective identities and
imaginations? Contributions can include but are not limited to:
revolutionary, embodied, spatial and affective solidarities; Cold War
official and unofficial networks, the solidarity of/with the displaced;
notions of re-framing, undoing and decolonising in relation to visual
interpretations of solidarity; failed attempts and their visual and
material cultures.

Witnesses to Existence: The ethics of Aesthetics

The ethical challenges to the visual representation of conflict are
deeply problematic. The ongoing dilemma for photographers of suffering
lies in the interplay between the desire to engender a social good – the
ending of exploitation, discrimination or extermination – with the
desire not to expose the victim to further unnecessary suffering, either
in the performative act of being photographed, or the re-performative
act of displaying that image to an audience. Concentrating on the
practice of imagemakers, contributions will examine the visual
strategies deployed by photographers in response to these challenges,
including the role of advocacy photography in human rights work, the
genre of aftermath photography, the forensic turn, and the role of
alternative dissemination spaces like the gallery and museum.

Visual Activism and the Middle East

Conflicts are no longer the major global events they once were. Rather
than exceptional events on isolated battlefields major-power conflict
have been largely neutralised (Hariman and Lucaites, 2016). Where
conflicts do persist, they can become routine and unexceptional, an
everyday disruption that people adapt to and endure. How do visual
activists record relationships between everyday life and larger forces
of domination, disruption and change as a consequence of ongoing
conflict as a form of resistance? With an emphasis on the middle-east,
this strand will discuss the evolving relationship between visual
activism, political resistance and photographic practices. In doing so,
it will consider proposals that seek to explore how such acts of
visibility making, including but not limited to traditional photographic
practices, can exist or meet at a number of social, spatial and artistic
intersections and/or can be understood as having multiple functions.

Pictures, Conflicts, Modes of Transmission

Pictures of conflict, especially those involving forms of documentation
or reportage, have generally been dependent on technologies of
transmission. These technologies have enabled pictures of conflict to be
moved across geographical distances, to be technically reproduced, and
to be circulated amongst spectators. They have included ‘wire’ systems
for the rapid movement of images between distant points, different forms
of printing and mass reproduction, and more recently, Internet-based
social media platforms that have enabled professionals and citizens
alike to upload and transmit pictures of contemporary conflict
situations. This strand seeks to explore both historical and
contemporary situations involving relationships between the visual
representation of conflict and modes of transmission, asking how have
such modes of transmission shaped the form and politics of pictures of
military and political confrontations and struggles?

The Unresolvable Past: Post-Conflict Trauma and Representation

The persistence of traumatic memory is a recognisable part of
post-conflict culture, often re-emerging long after the events that
caused it to have ceased. As Bennett (2005) suggests, it is art’s
affective power that enables it to go beyond apparent claims to the
objective documentation of conflict in that the form of the work itself
helps to convey more elliptical forms of understanding. This strand
invites papers that engage with the active and selective representation
of themes related to post-conflict trauma within visual or material
culture. To what extent, for example, can narration or depiction provide
a means of dealing with the cataclysmic past, and can this process ever
be complete, or even sufficient?

Conference Schedule

The conference sessions will be held in the morning and afternoon on
Thursday and Friday, 24 & 25 May 2018.

Students Cost: £15.00 one day, £25.00 for two-days and £40.00 for all
three days
(Prices include tea/coffee/refreshments and 2x course hot lunch buffet
with desert)

Register Online
Funding

There is a limited amount of funding available to put towards travel
costs. Priority will be given to conference presenters who are
independent practitioners or scholars as well as early career and
postgraduate students.

The conference and workshop are funded by the Postgraduate Arts and
Humanities Centre (PAHC) and the Manchester School of Art Research
Centre at MMU; RAH! the Research in Arts and Humanities public
engagement programme at MMU; The University of Central Lancashire; AHRC
NWCDTP Cohort Development Fund; the London College of Communication,
UAL; the Jean Monnet Centre of Excellence at the University of Manchester.

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